


Happiness

by DottyDot



Series: How It Could Happen [3]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, jonsa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 19:13:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17371751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DottyDot/pseuds/DottyDot
Summary: "I thought it's been you all along. The answer to my prayers, even when I didn't know what I was praying for, or that I was even praying."





	Happiness

Sansa found him in the crypts, standing before his mother's statue. She stood a few feet away and waited. She expected he would be unfit for conversation, angry, devastated, tormented for having given away the North when he now had no hereditary claim on it. The darkness of the crypts was so heavy the candles seemed to struggle to stay lit at all and barely illuminated the statues, let alone the living. She was surprised to hear Jon's voice, more surprised at what he said, "What do you think of the Queen?"

Sansa was grateful he was not looking at her face, so he did not see the small, immediate grimace. "She's very beautiful."

"Aye."

"Baelish said you would marry her."

"I might've, if she'd asked."

"That's--understandable. I have only met her and am slightly awed. Seeing her before an army or on a dragon--it would be surreal. Just standing in the courtyard I thought she looked like a vengeful goddess come to us in our most desperate hour. Every man here will fall for her before the day is done." She attempted to speak lightly, not add to any of the burdens he carried.

"I don't love her."

"Oh." She thought to find him sullen and silent upon the revelation of his parentage, but instead he spoke of the Targaryen, and she had braced herself for him to determine to announce his ancestry and marry the Queen. He was no longer a bastard, and Targaryens married their own. She did not expect _this_ declaration, and she certainly did not expect him to speak of his feelings with her. This vulnerability was strange, as was the light in his eyes. They were bright, but held no tears. It disturbed her to find him so, and worried her that she now did not know what to say. Jon was not himself, _she_ was not herself, and she was not sure if it was his time away or the news of his parents that had affected them so. He seemed preoccupied with the Targaryen, but perhaps that was simply easier to speak of. She searched for anything she could say to mend whatever needed to be mended, but this was beyond her words. There really wasn't anything that could be said about the day's revelations or anything that had occurred in the past weeks and months. Dragons which hadn't existed for a hundred years were in the North to fight an army of resurrected dead. Her sister was an assassin who wore other people's faces. Her younger brother was an all seeing entity. Her older brother was now her cousin. Her father was a liar. Nothing much made sense anymore. Perhaps it was only the confusion of everything that left her so unsteady.

"Arya said the Lords were angry. That they wanted to make you their Queen."

Panic. "I swear to you Jon, I didn't--"

He held up a hand to quiet her, finally looking at her rather than the statue. "You came to me and put a direwolf on my chest and told me I was your brother, that I was the one to reclaim Winterfell. You rallied me to your cause and the bannermen. And you summoned a man who sold you to be brutalized to ensure our victory, to protect me against my own instincts. You never raised a sword to swear allegiance to me, but it was you who proclaimed me a Stark and climbed back into your own hell to save us. You don't _ever_ have to explain your actions to me." His voice was so raw it pained her to hear it. She felt it roll over her like a rough cloth, at once both tearing at her skin and comforting her.

"You're my--you're family. I would do anything for you." She found her voice faltered, and as she stood before his weary eyes she trembled. What was happening was unidentifiable to her, beyond her understanding, but something was shifting within Jon and she was afraid it would shift something within herself as well.

"I know that." He stepped a little closer to her, "No one understands what we are to each other, do they?"

"No." No one else knew what it was to see Jon after years among her enemies, and she wasn't sure she knew what it meant herself. Something that felt like dread came to life within her, although what she feared she could not say. Not Jon, never Jon, but what she felt was somehow devastating. Perhaps the newly discovered inability to discern whether she was suffering from joy or relishing in pain worried her. Perhaps the fact that it was both and more troubled her. Perhaps the fact that the delicate thread of life she had so carefully wound around her spool of planning and control was unraveling terrified her. Perhaps she did not want to know exactly what they were because she did not want to know anymore sorrow or anymore pleasure. She simply could not bear anymore, good or bad.

But Jon persisted. "And we are, we are something _different_ , aren't we?"

"Yes." She could barely expend the necessary air to breathe out the word. She didn't understand what he was trying to tell her, what she was trying to tell him, but it was true. Being reunited with Bran and Arya had only made her relationship with Jon feel more undefinable. It was not at all what she felt in either other relationship, and it worried her now that it was expressed. The deep cold of the crypts had numbed her fingers, but it was something else that began to make her shiver. It could be the tension in his voice, habitually so warm with her. This conversation was making her feel things she had not felt before, and think things she had not thought before.

His eyes turned back to Lyanna's face. "Daenerys spoke of those who used and abused her, who would have her killed, as if that made it right to invade a country with an army who rape and pillage, with dragons who burn indiscriminately, as if that justified her deciding we were all hers for the taking regardless of whether she was deserving or undeserving. And all I could think while she spoke of her misfortunes was Sansa suffered, and asks for nothing. Sansa suffered, and doesn't even speak of it. Sansa suffered, and instead of killing for power--"

Jon was looking at her again and she had the inexplicable urge to laugh and also the urgent need to cry, and she could not determine which was more demanding or why she would feel either. But he was still speaking.

"--you kept giving away whatever you managed to cobble together. You could have used me, used me to win your battle, insisted you were the true-born Stark, that the North was yours, but you didn't. Daenerys wanted power to avenge herself upon dead men, to conquer a country she doesn't know, to rule a place she doesn't understand. You wanted your family to be safe, but you wouldn't take the power, even when it was within your grasp."

It was unbearably hard to speak when she could not read his expression, and she still did not understand why they spoke of the Dragon Queen and her instead of _him_. "Bran told me what he and Sam discovered. I'm afraid for you. I'm afraid of what Daenerys might do."

"I know. I know what may come of this. All I can think when I look at Danaerys is that she is a woman deformed by her wants, a good thing twisted into something dangerous and deadly."

Sansa swallowed a sob. This was no time to fall apart, but she was relieved she would not have to fight Jon about hiding the truth a little longer. "We will keep it a secret until after the battle, maybe until the war in the South is done too."

"I'm not going South. We will fight the Night King, and I'll renounce my claim in exchange for Northern independence. I don't want her throne, and I'll not fight a pointless war for her. Her armies will not all survive the winter, and I doubt her dragons will emerge unscathed. You will not be told to bend the knee or burn."

Sansa was unsure if he had simply determined on a course and believed in it, or if he knew what the fate of the armies were, if Bran had told him of other visions he had not shared with her. But that was the war for the tomorrows to come. The battle of today was for Jon's peace of mind. "If that's what you want--it would make us all happy, for you to stay in the North. When the time comes we will speak to a few Lords separately to break the news--"

"Does it change anything for you, knowing now?"

His parents, they had come to it. How to answer such a question. What did it mean that he was her cousin and not the ostracized half-brother of her childhood? Anything? Everything? Did that tenuous relationship born of existing in the same castle matter more or less now that their true relationship was not what they had been told? Had what they thought of their childhood mattered when she flung herself into his arms at Castle Black? Had it mattered when she watched him nearly kill Ramsey with his bare hands? Had it mattered when he told her they must trust one another and then shown that he did by leaving her in charge of the North? He had been haunted by a childhood she regretted. His life had been built in the shadows of a past she could not possibly understand. It mattered to her only as much as it mattered to him. He was the man she met when she needed a protector, not the boy her mother resented. She was not the girl who lived to please her Septa, she was the servant of the North, the Lady of Winterfell. What did Jon's parentage matter to any of that? Did it matter who his parents were when he had brought back armies and dragons to defend mankind? Could anything said about him change who he was? What they were to each other? The answer was too simple and too complicated. Yes and no, completely and not at all. She still had not spoken, and her tongue was reluctant to move.

"In the Capital I was called 'little bird' and 'little dove' as if I were just a songbird sitting in a cage, that they could make sing whatever tune they taught me. It was hard not to believe them. When I was here, before we retook it, I came down to the crypt, and found this." Sansa retrieved a feather from her person. "I don't wear it anymore, but I found it here, at the foot of your mother's statue, and it was a comfort to me. I didn't know why, father never spoke much of your mother, but she was like Arya, a true Northern girl who rode and fought." She paused, searching for what she was trying to say, and Jon waited, of course Jon waited patiently for her, even though it was his life that had been upended. "When I found that feather I thought it meant she had been looking out for me, that she brought me to safety. I didn't bring this feather with me when I ran, but when we retook Winterfell I found it, sitting in the room where I had left it."

"Am I the feather? You picked it up and took care of it?" Jon sounded lost by her answer, but she wasn't looking at him, choosing to stare at the statue instead.

"No, I was that feather. And your mother gave me strength until I found you, and then just like her hands must have cradled that feather, you kept me safe. I hadn't felt safe for so long. I had forgotten how to trust anyone when I ran to you, but you picked me up. You hugged me and you swore to protect me. And when Bran told me who you were I thought it made sense. I thought there was a reason. I thought it's been you all along. The answer to my prayers, even when I didn't know what I was praying for, or that I was even praying. You made me safe again. I may have sewn a sigil on your cloak, but you said I was a Stark just as loudly. You are so much like father, so Northern, I think you've always been more of a Stark than me. Don't let any uncovered secrets change you. It doesn't matter what people call you. You are _you_ , regardless of who you father was, regardless of your mother." Sansa forced herself to look at Jon in spite of her embarrassment. "I never would have wanted you to suffer this, but yes, we are different, we are _not_ siblings, and I am happy for it."

Jon's hands were on her cheeks, his thumbs resting on the ridges of her cheekbones, his eyes too bright, his own skin too flushed, for her to mistake his intention. "Sansa--"

She kissed him, briefly, sweetly. It was strange to kiss a man she was not afraid of, a man she trusted. It made her giddy, she felt a little wild, but this was Jon, and there was war coming, and she was weighed down by the burden of what this was. And again, she could not decide between laughter and tears.

"I'm the answer to your prayers?" His gentle bemusement came out in huffs of hot air on her cheek, so she kissed him again quickly, and then again, because she could still feel the rumbles of his silent laughter in his chest.

"Am I your hero, Sansa Stark?"

"No, you're stupid and annoying" but she smiled against his lips. He laughed, happier than she could have ever thought he'd be at such a time, perhaps the happiest she had seen him since Castle Black. Then he kissed her, and that was a different thing altogether from her shy kisses. She was not self aware for some time before she realized she must have been pulled up into his arms because soon she felt her toes touch the ground as he let her slide gently back to her feet.

"Maybe you are my hero, but don't let it go to your head." She ran a finger over his scruff, "And you are not marrying that fire breather."

"Never" he swore, shame settling on his face.

"It's alright." She smiled at him and laced her fingers with his, preparing to lead him from the crypts, surprised when he resisted.

"Sansa, I--" He could barely meet her eyes, and she decided it was charming that searching for words was what discomfited him.

"I thought not being father's son would destroy my life, but it may be what gives me the only thing worth living for."

"We live for the North."

Jon touched her cheeks with cold hands, gently cradling her face, unsure and yet so very sure of his words, "No Sansa, I live for you."

" _Jon_ \--"

"You're the first look I had beyond the wall. It was a vast fierceness covered over in pure snow, like it was just waiting for me to come close and learn it's secrets." He kissed her cheek, his beard the same delicious rub against her skin as his voice. "You're Ghost when he runs off into the woods and doesn't come when I call, but he does come back, he always comes back, and I'm my whole self again." He kissed her other cheek as if his lips were uncontrollably drawn to her skin.

"You're my hero and I'm your _pet_?" She couldn't help her smile when he blushed. Teasing him was in fact _more_ addictive than arguing with him.

"I'm no poet, but--" he hesitated the briefest moment before continuing "--you're the sound of the birds flying North again when winter is finished, that first wild berry of Summer that Bran would find before anyone else. You're the laughter of the hunters when they're returning after a good hunt, the hugs of their children in welcome."

Sansa placed her hand over his, kissing the palm that caressed her cheek.

"You're a wild thing I can never predict, and yet you're home, unknowable and what I know best, both at once."

Sansa was filled with a lightness she hadn't felt since she was a girl. Every brief moment of joy at reunion with her siblings had been so closely followed by fear, uncertainty, that even now, happiness appeared as a stranger. But this, this she would not allow anything to touch. As unrecognizable as it had been to her at first, this happiness was theirs, shining softly in the dark crypt of Winterfell. "No one has ever said such sweet things to me before." Her hands tangled in his curls, and she expected him to stop, but he smiled, and continued.

"You used to sing songs, stories about heroes and lovers, you're those. So beautiful they fill you up with too much happiness to hold, and you weep because such goodness breaks into every dark part of you, healing things you didn't know could be mended."

"You're a liar, Jon Snow. You _are_ a poet." She tried to tease him, but now tears were falling. She had never expected a love like this, or much love at all, and certainly not such sentiments verbalized by Jon. His words quieted fears and eased pains she had carried since leaving her home all those years ago. They hurried her back to a time when she believed in many things, restoring her to a Sansa she had long since abandoned.

He kissed her nose to make her laugh, and to distract her from his embarrassment over his own smiles and blushes. It wasn't dark enough in the crypts to hide _that_.

"I think you're a promise of every good thing to come, the history of our family, the present, and the future of it too." He tugged her tightly to his chest because as close as they stood, it was not close enough. "None of us would be here without you. Your planning is what will keep our people alive during the long winter, and it will be your children who carry on the Stark name for generations."

Sansa tucked her face away on his shoulder and murmured into his curls, "Don't you mean _our_ children?"

Jon sucked in a breath as if what was happening hadn't fully registered with him before. Sansa felt him shudder once in a silent sob. Finally, he breathed through his tears and in a whisper, "Yes, Sansa. Our children."

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


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